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Company Information
- Headquarter: Grand Rapids, Michigan
- Over 100 years in business
- Inpatient and outpatient
- 22 satellite clinics
- 200,000 client visits a year
- 1500 employees
- 9 IT employees
- IT Infrastructure
- HP Servers
- VMware
- Xen Server and Desktops
- Exchange 2010
- SharePoint 2010
- Direct-attached Storage
- Network-attached Storage
- StorSimple 1010 Appliances
- StorSimple Data Protection
- StorSimple SharePoint Optimizer
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Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services operates on a tight budget. Every dollar spent on IT is a dollar that is not going to support the community. The company’s IT services were stretched to the limit. Users were constrained to 100 MB Exchange inboxes, they were forced to store files on their computer hard drives, and there was no good way for them to collaborate on shared documents. IT knew that they had to provide a better solution to the users, but could not do it cost effectively.
Pine Rest selected StorSimple to solve their file server, Exchange and SharePoint storage needs after evaluating several cloud and traditional storage options. The StorSimple solution will replace direct-attached storage and tape backup devices. Pine Rest will give users multi-Gigabyte inboxes and migrate nearly 1 TB of content into SharePoint 2010 with storage provided by StorSimple.
With Pine Rest being in the healthcare business, security was a paramount concern. They considered various cloud solutions including SaaS, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud solutions. SaaS and public cloud solutions would not pass HIPAA requirements because data could be accessed by the service provider. Private cloud solutions were too expensive. The StorSimple hybrid cloud solution was the only solution that dramatically lowered storage costs and was secure.
“Our HIPAA security officer reviewed the tools and technologies and what we are using. He had no problem signing off that this was an acceptable use.”
A redundant data center was out of the question for Pine Rest. They were particularly interested in StorSimple because it enabled the company to have a disaster recovery solution that they could afford. A virtualized backup data center in the cloud that would be activated in a disaster brought the cost down to almost zero unless a disaster occurred. Pine Rest will be using a cloud computing provider to turn on virtual machines in case of a disaster and will access data stored through StorSimple. If no disaster occurs, nearly no cost is incurred.
Now that the StorSimple solution is implemented, what comments did Pine Rest have? “”Like the name, it was very simple. Very little effort was required to get it up and running,” said Ryan Dengate, IT Manager. “There were no new technologies that the servers did not recognize.”
After Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, and file server migration, Pine Rest plans to use StorSimple for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) storage using Xen server and desktops. With the intelligent deduplication and data tiering, the overwhelming redundancy in virtual machine images can be dramatically reduced.
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